After Images
by Perfections-Cat
Summary: Death had a terrible habit of carving its final gift into his memory. Sasuke centric drabble. Spoiler warning for Sasuke's backstory.


The worst part of death is the after effects. Not the mourning that follows, nameless people dressed in black, faces lined with grim acceptance, offering their condolences and whispering of all sorts of things. (And it wasn't as though he couldn't hear them: What would become of him and what of his brother? Was he doomed to follow that same sort of path, they did, after all, share the same blood? For what other reason would he have been left alive? How could such a family spawn such a thing?) Not even the funerals, stiff forms of what had once been his closest kin never to laugh or smile or call his name anymore, disturbed him. No, none of this ate at Sasuke the way that death's parting blow did.

Death – though this was murder, not just a passing - wasn't something that ended with the funeral. He wondered why people insisted that funerals were the opposite of weddings. With marriage, you went into it single and came out of it united with another being; with funerals, you came into it dead and left in the same manner, only buried six-feet under with a floral sympathy spread over the grave. There was no change involved; it stuck with you. The images and memories were things he could never divorce himself from.

It was part of the reason he pushed himself so hard. True enough that the desire to break his brother spurred on his endless training, but this was not the sole reason. In an outpouring of sweat and blood, he had found a way to negate the effects of death's aftermath. Nights spent wide awake, steeped in anger and driven to the edge of human limits, allowed him the solace that had long escaped him. Exhausted to the point he practically lost consciousness, Sasuke could fall into sleep.

But it wasn't something he could continually do. An existence spent like that would only call upon death once more, and then he would have truly wasted his life. So there were nights when he could not forget, or rather memory wouldn't let him forget. After all, what good would he be, what possible worth could he have, if he did pack away those thoughts, forever stored in the attic of his mind to collect dust and grow stale and faded with time?

Those memories wouldn't bubble to the surface at first, though. Death, he had found, had a cruel sense of humor. Instead, they waited until he neared the precipice of deep sleep; then those crimson dreams would begin to move. And it wasn't a smooth, true-to-life sort of movement, but rather a disjointed, broken-boned and slit-throat gurgle of life that spilled up out of the depths.

When he first started having these nightmares, he would spring upright and cry for mercy, eyes bleeding tears. Only no one came running to quell his fears, a thought that would send him plummeting into despair. Blanketed by these feelings, he would suffer through the night, unable to sleep, much less move, as the visions of that blood-soaked day assaulted his young mind.

Gradually though, he became accustomed to their torment. He began to learn the small nuances that foreshadowed their arrival: a breath that would catch in his throat every now and then, a slight stiffening of his limbs, a sudden flush of heat that would stain his cheeks pink. While these signs allowed him to waken, and thus prepare, himself before the attack was launched, he could never prevent himself from breaking into a sweat, could never stopper the pain as it soaked into his muscles. But it was better than being startled into wakefulness by a torrent of fear-ridden dreams.

It still hurt, though, to see his family walking before him once more. Not even his best defenses – carefully constructed after years of dealing with death's parting gift – could stop the painful longing for them, for a time well-before his brother had begun to change. His mother would turn and smile at him when the pain hit a pivotal peak, her eyes shining with a kindness he had yet to come across again. Soft hands would reach out, tussling his hair then drawing him into an embrace, which he promptly complained about. After all, what sort of shinobi openly hugged his mother?

The visions would flash forward, not in time, but to another place. His father, stern and unreadable, stood a few feet away. A brief glance in his direction was all the acknowledgment that Sasuke needed, a sense of immutable joy welling up within his small body. From there, he would dash off, tossing a few words explaining the where's and why's to his mother, before he sprinted out the door, a bag full of kunai and shurikan in his hand.

It was at this point that things would go horribly wrong. These fading visions of his parents would begin to melt together, faces twisting and contorting as they were whipped around and apart from bodies he remembered the warmth of all too well. A flash of lightning and his brother stood before him, blood dropping accusingly from his hands. From the back of his head, a dull ache would begin, growing louder and more painful until it exploded in a high-pitched scream of a child's terror.

Bodies would appear misplaced in these dreams, dropping before him lifeless and far too warm to be called dead just yet. He was certain he could have still moved their limbs had he attempted it, hopelessly urging the bodies back into life even as it spilled out carelessly over his hands, bubbled out over his clothes. He was certain this one, an aunt from down the street, had been killed on the corner by the rice shop. She had no right to be dangling uselessly over one of the kitchen chairs.

However, there was one pair of figures that never left their designated spots of death. Every time he found himself looking, usually following a savage beating by his brother, his parents lay twisted up in one another at the center of their living room. His father's eyes would always alight upon his shaking form, a sense of regret and unmuted fear boring through them before the light would pass from them completely. His mother was already dead, though he swore at times he saw her fingers twitching beneath the weight of his father.

And he would scream bloody murder then. A single note of pure terror as his mind raced with a single thought, _I don't want to die_. Sasuke hated himself for that, and every time he hit that moment, a wave of nausea would boil in his stomach. Before he had learned to stave off the feeling, he would vomit over the side of the bed. But with this release the dreams would pass, though he never sought sleep afterwards. However, having learned to control that desire – though on occasion it simply proved too much for him to hold down – the visions continued their assault, dabbling in the realms of fanciful action rather than based in any truth. Most of the time it merely led him to his brother, soaked with the blood of their family no matter what he wore, who would torture him relentlessly, constantly pounding into his head that he was still too weak, only fit to be broken and battered but never killed.

That's how Sasuke would begin his day, the images sinking back into the darkness with the rising of the sun. He would quietly slip from his bed, the sheets a damp mess, and slide into the shower. The water would run cold over his figure, taking with it the residual after images of the night. He could never quite get the aftertaste of death – somewhat like the copper-tinge of blood and the salty-sweetness of skin tied together with the bitterness of an overripe lemon - out of his mouth though, no matter how many times he brushed his teeth.


End file.
